Category : Biloxi, MS

Three corrections improve a set in Biloxi faster than any technique, and all three are about what this coast actually is rather than what visitors expect. The first is the water. Biloxi faces the Mississippi Sound, which is shallow and brackish and sheltered from the open Gulf by barrier islands some distance offshore, carrying enough suspended sediment to read green-brown rather than turquoise — and with the barrier islands taking the swell, there is essentially no surf. Nobody should be promised Caribbean water or a breaking wave.

What the Sound gives instead is genuinely useful: a very broad open horizon, a great deal of sky, and water calm enough to reflect properly on a still morning. The second correction is the beach, which is man-made. The long sand strip along this shoreline was created in the middle of the twentieth century and is one of the longest artificial beaches anywhere — flat, wide, pale and largely featureless, with the coast highway running along its landward side. At midday it is a difficult surface: bright, contrasty and reflecting upward into faces, with no shade anywhere.

At the ends of the day it is excellent, and its single greatest asset is wet sand at low water, which is a genuine mirror. A couple reflected in flat wet sand with a low sun behind them, camera at ground level, is the frame this shoreline exists for — so go at the bottom of the tide and work from the ground, because from standing height wet sand is only a shiny grey surface. The highway is the third correction and it is a practical one.

At most properties on this shore the beach is on the far side of a busy road from the building, which means crossing it with a wedding party, traffic noise in any ceremony near the water, and vehicles in the background of any frame looking landward. Establish how the crossing works and how long it takes, because it is usually longer than it looks. Two features of the region do most of the positive work. The first is the raised gallery, which is the local architectural type and the best outdoor portrait light on this coast at any hour of any day.

A roofed gallery removes the overhead portion of the sky, and at thirty degrees north the overhead sky is exactly the part that causes trouble — a midsummer noon sun near eighty-three degrees, within seven of straight overhead, is what puts black shadows in eye sockets and under jaws. Take the roof out of the equation and what remains arrives horizontally from a very large bright area, with the gallery floor bouncing a little back up underneath: soft, directional and filled from below, which is precisely the geometry a face wants, available at eleven in the morning in July when nothing else outdoors is.

Work about a metre inside the line of the columns, because falloff from a gallery edge is roughly a stop per step, and photograph along a colonnade rather than across it, because a run of columns gives a receding rhythm with air between the shafts and a built-in vanishing point. The second is the live oak. Evergreen, broad and low-crowned, with heavy limbs running out horizontally and dipping toward the ground, and the oaks on this coast are old and very large.

They cast genuine solid shade with no dapple, and they do it in January exactly as in July because the leaves never leave — which means one of them is a reliable midday position in any month and a winter frame here looks much like an autumn one. Their bark is deeply furrowed and full of small shadow, so at noon an old oak is a dark mass with a bright edge and at six it is a structure with texture in it.

Spanish moss hanging from the limbs is not a moss but a bromeliad, an air plant, and backlit against a low sun it glows — one of the most distinctive details the region offers, and a curtain of it in the foreground gives depth to a frame that would otherwise be flat. Look for resurrection fern on the upper surfaces of the big limbs too: it greens within hours of rain and curls brown in a dry spell, so the same limb photographs completely differently depending on the week.

Two further facts about this shoreline need stating plainly. The first is Hurricane Katrina, which came ashore here in 2005 with a storm surge that destroyed a great deal of the Mississippi coast. The consequence for a photographer is that much of the historic fabric standing today is substantially restoration rather than original — some surfaces are original and some are reconstruction, and at close range in flat light the difference can show. Restored buildings therefore photograph best at distance or in low raking light, where construction detail stops being legible and mass, silhouette and proportion take over.

Many of the coast's live oaks survived, and a number that did not were subsequently carved into sculpture, which is a well-known feature of this shoreline; where carved oak exists, treat it as sculpture photographed close in raking light rather than as a backdrop. The second is that this coast has venues whose history requires a decision rather than a technique, and the guides here name it plainly rather than working around it.

A couple considering a site that commemorates the Confederacy — or any property built by enslaved people, which on this coast in the 1840s and 1850s means essentially every substantial building — should decide about that deliberately rather than by default. Many people, photographers included, decline such venues, which is a coherent and respectable position; others book them having thought it through. Booking without having thought about it is the option that tends to be regretted.

There is a working consequence too: keep memorials, cemeteries and the specific interpretive features out of the wedding coverage entirely, because using them as picturesque backdrops is the specific failure that gets this kind of venue written about badly, and it usually happens by accident rather than intent. Two numbers govern the schedule at every venue here. At about thirty degrees north the midsummer noon sun reaches roughly eighty-three degrees, which dominates the middle of the day from May into September and is why the galleries and the oaks matter so much.

And civil twilight runs about twenty-two minutes, among the shortest in this library, of which the usable balance point is perhaps ten — so the end of the day is brief and its frames have to be decided in advance and walked to rather than discussed as the light goes. Humidity is the great compensator and here it is among the strongest in this collection.

Summer dewpoints sit in the mid to high seventies, which means the air is saturated with water vapour and vapour scatters light in every direction: a sunlit lawn in July carries something like two and a half stops less shadow contrast than the same sun angle in a dry climate, so shadow edges are soft, eye sockets hold detail, and open shade at midday is genuinely workable. The extreme sun angle and the generous fill partly cancel, and desert instincts about the middle of the day do not apply with anything like the same force.

The costs are a pale washed sky that adds nothing to a wide frame, visible haze on long lenses, and a lens that fogs within seconds moving from an air-conditioned interior into this air — a recurring event rather than a one-off on a day that alternates between a cooled room and a July gallery, so keep the camera warm rather than cool.

The land is coastal plain and dead level, with no relief at all, so there is no elevated viewpoint except a raised gallery or a hotel floor, no slope to separate a subject from a background, and a level horizon in every direction — which makes any camera tilt immediately obvious. Use a level outdoors here. Season by season, December through April is the season and the reversal against most of this library is emphatic. Mild, comparatively dry, sunny, with a February noon sun near forty-five degrees that models a face rather than flattening it and rakes a colonnade, cast iron or brickwork properly.

Azaleas and camellias through late winter and early spring. And because the live oaks are evergreen and the moss hangs year-round, a January frame looks very much like an October one — so the off season costs almost nothing in appearance and gains everything in comfort and sun angle. Cold dry winter air also gives a deeply coloured sky rather than a washed one, which matters more here than it sounds, because a white lighthouse or a pale gallery against a saturated blue is a completely different photograph from the same subject against hazy grey-white. May through September is the constraint.

Nineties heat with high-seventies dewpoints, in formal clothing, is a welfare matter before it is a photographic one, and this coast has mosquitoes and, on the beach, biting flies in season, which will determine how long anybody stands anywhere. The practical shape of a summer day is the two ends outdoors and the middle under a gallery roof, under an oak, or indoors.

Afternoon convection is near-daily in the wet season and this coast receives a great deal of lightning, so any outdoor element in summer needs a covered alternative that genuinely exists and is reachable in minutes, with its capacity known as a number — and on an open beachfront with no shelter, that is a safety matter rather than a comfort one.

Hurricane season runs June through November and peaks in August and September, and on this particular coast it is not a remote consideration: this shoreline has been struck hard within living memory, and a named storm in the Gulf a week out disrupts travel, suppliers and accommodation whether or not it makes landfall nearby. A summer or early-autumn date here deserves a genuine contingency and, frankly, a conversation about insurance.

The compensation is the half hour after a cell clears, which is the best light of the year: washed air so the Sound and the barrier islands finally resolve, wet sand at its most mirror-like, wet brick and wet road surface several tones darker and far more saturated, saturated planting, resurrection fern greened up on the oak limbs within hours, and a low sun under a broken ceiling. If a storm goes through at six, do not pack.

And fog is worth watching for in late winter and early spring, when warm moist air moves over cooler water — a pale tower or a lit frontage emerging from fog is an unusual and rather beautiful frame that cannot be planned, so work immediately if it happens, because coastal fog lifts.